A call to freedom

Parenting can be tough…

A week or two ago I bought a Star Wars themed game for the Wii. It follows the story of all six movies fairly closely, and Trudy and I would frequently compare it to the canonical story. Our daughters would often look confused. Then we realised.

Our kids have never seen Star Wars.

Thanks to my sister-in-law Lisa we actually own a DVD boxed set of episodes IV to VI. The girls know who some of the characters are—Charis even has a Darth Vader costume and a Darth Vader doll that says Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side of the Force! Yet they’ve never watched the movies.

The big question for us was whether to show the movies in the order they were released or simply start at The Phantom Menace and work our way through to The Return of the Jedi. We went with the latter, so things would make a little more sense.

So today we sat down and watched the first two movies. We have a public holiday on Monday so we’re going to get another one or two knocked over then. By the end of next week we hope to have knocked over another important milestone in the education of our children!

Parenting can be so hard.

I’d love to hear a few stories about how readers remember their Star Wars experiences, as well as the experiences of their children. Please, comment away!

I’ve never heard anyone say that about Star Wars, Jack, which surprises me. I can understand how some Christians would be concerned.

The criticism I am aware of centres around the apparently Taoist idea of ‘the Force.’ Yet the similarity is superficial at best. In Taoism good and evil are merely aspects of a being’s nature that need to be properly balanced. In fact, you can’t have one without the other. Moral behaviour is a matter of following your own nature. In Star Wars this isn’t the case—evil is absolute, to be shunned, rooted out and destroyed. In some ways, this is far closer to Christianity than the ‘new age’ ideas it seems to resemble.

Still, there’s far more to Star Wars than just the Force—it’s an epic story which seems to pull in themes from all of the greatest stories in history. I find the politics much more interesting—the way Palpatine manipulates politics on a galactic scale in order to destroy democracy and make himself Emperor is a sober warning which wouldn’t be out of place in a discussion of George Orwell’s Animal Farm or even 1984. Another theme that is often overlooked is the idea that hanging on to life at all costs is foolish—indeed, the path to immortality is via death. Where have I seen that before?

And don’t knock the Veggie Tales. I’m not overly fond of the artefacts of Christian subculture, but I do have a soft spot for the Veggie Tales. Any cartoon that rates a mention on the Simpsons without being mocked can’t be all bad!

Lets not stop with Star Wars, lets block Harry Potter, and then lets stop out kids from seeing any film that isn’t about the life of Jesus, apart from the ones which we don’t approve of, and maybe going to the movies is the devils work anyway, so lets ban going to the cinema. With the price of popcorn these days we ain’t going to get into Heaven when Jesus finds out we paid $10 for a large cartoon instead of donating it to the church.